South Sudan Post-Independence: Things Fall Apart

Three years into its independence, South Sudan faces multiple crises on political, security, and humanitarian fronts. After almost a decade of relative peace following the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) with Sudan in 2005, a political dispute within South Sudan’s ruling party, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), devolved into armed conflict in December 2013. The jubilance and optimism that accompanied the new country’s independence from Sudan in July 2011 were eroded; in their wake, prospects for a peace dividend have become bleak.

This was not the war that many had anticipated following the signing of the CPA and South Sudan’s subsequent independence. That war would have been a reprise of North–South conflict that characterized the first (1956–1972) and second (1983–2005) Sudanese civil wars. Rather, the conflict that emerged in South Sudan could be understood as a continuation of unresolved South–South tensions that were, arguably, never adequately addressed by the CPA. Contrary to its name, the CPA was an elite bargain between Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party and the strongest element of the southern resistance, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A).